NY Times Op-ed, August 9, 2020
A Song That Changed Music Forever
100 years ago, Mamie Smith recorded a seminal blues hit that gave voice
to outrage at violence against Black Americans.
ByDavid Hajdu
Mr. Hajdu is a cultural historian and music critic.
* Aug. 8, 2020
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Sheet music cover for “Crazy Blues.”
Sheet music cover for “Crazy Blues.”Credit...Robert Langmuir African
American Photograph Collection at Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives,
and Rare Book Library, Emory University
On Aug. 10, 1920, two African-American musicians, Mamie Smith and Perry
Bradford, went into a New York studio and changed the course of music
history. Ms. Smith, then a modestly successful singer from Cincinnati
who had made only one other record, a sultry ballad that fizzled in the
marketplace, recorded a new song by Mr. Bradford called “Crazy Blues
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaz4Ziw_CfQ>.” A boisterous cry of
outrage by a woman driven mad by mistreatment, the song spoke with
urgency and fire to Black listeners across the country who had been
ravaged by the abuses of race-hate groups, the police and military
forces in the preceding year — the notorious “Red Summer
<https://time.com/5636454/what-is-red-summer/>” of 1919.
“Crazy Blues” became a hit record of unmatched proportions and profound
impact. Within a month of its release, it sold some 75,000 copies and
would be reported to sell more than two million over time. It
established the blues as a popular art and prepared the way for a
century of Black expression in the fiery core of American music.
As a record, something made for private listening in the home, “Crazy
Blues” was able to say things rarely heard in public performances.
Seemingly a song about a woman whose man has left her, it reveals
itself, on close listening, to be a song about a woman moved to kill her
abusive partner. As a work of blues, it used the language of domestic
strife to tell a story of violence and subjugation that Black Americans
also knew outside the home, in a world of white oppression. The blues
worked on multiple levels simultaneously and partly in code, with “my
man” or “the man” translatable as “the white man” or “white people.”
Ms. Smith, a skilled contralto with a keen sense of drama, brought
clarity and panache to words that would strike today’s listeners as
conventional only because they have been replicated and emulated in
countless variations over the past century: “I can’t sleep at night/ I
can’t eat a bite/ ’Cause the man I love/ he don’t treat me right.”
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Out of her mind with despair, the singer turns to violence against her
oppressor for relief in the chorus that gives the song its title: “Now
the doctor’s gonna do all that he can/ But what you’re gonna need is an
undertaker man/ I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news/ Now I’ve got the crazy
blues.”
That a woman was singing made the song an acutely potent message of
protest against the forces of authority, be they male or white, domestic
or sociopolitical.
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With “Crazy Blues,” Mamie Smith opened the door to a surge of powerfully
voiced female singers who defied the conventions of singerly gentility
to make the blues a popular phenomenon in the 1920s. Indeed, the blues
became a full-blown craze, with listeners of every color able to buy and
listen at home to music marketed as “race records.” The form was
initially associated almost exclusively with women such as Ms. Smith, Ma
Rainey, Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith. They and many more women made
hundreds of records that sold millions of copies over more than a decade
— well before the great bluesman Robert Johnson stepped into a recording
studio for the first time, in November 1936.
There had been some blues recordings before “Crazy Blues,” nearly all
instrumentals or records, often made by white musicians, of songs of
various kinds with the word “Blues” in the title. A feeling of veracity
as Black expression was part of the secret of “Crazy Blues.” But so was
the song’s disturbing but powerful ending, in which Ms. Smith sings
allegorically of the darkening circumstances: “There’s a change in the
ocean/ change in the deep blue sea.” In the concluding verse, she speaks
of changing the way she responds. She has decided to “go and get some
hop,” she announces, and “get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop.”
It was an idea at once abhorrent and cathartic. Recorded in the wake of
horrific violence against African-Americans, “Crazy Blues” was not only
an outlet for exasperation in the face of “nothin’ but bad news.” It was
also a rallying cry in Black musical language and a call for redress
through reciprocal violence — one that broke daringly out of domestic
allegory into a literal sphere where the police and the military claimed
the only prerogative to shoot at will.
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One hundred years later, the blues endures as the essence of American
music, from rock ’n’ roll and three-chord country songs to hip-hop and
contemporary R&B. If in a 2020 hit like Chris Brown and Young Thug’s “Go
Crazy,” the title means to party, not to feel blue, we should remember
that Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was also a dance tune: People were not
only moved by it; they moved to it.
From its earliest days, the blues has always done many and sometimes
contradictory things at the same time, as both an outlet for rage and a
release from it. Hatred and violence have hardly disappeared from the
American landscape, but neither has the blues.
David Hajdu (@davidhajdu <https://twitter.com/davidhajdu_>) is the music
critic for The Nation, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism and the author of the forthcoming “Adrianne Geffel:
A Fiction.”
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